The Racial Contempt of the Republican National Convention

[Nevilledog]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/nycha-rnc-videos-naturalization-trump-racism.html

When the Democratic National Convention wrapped, there were two obvious questions about how the Republicans would respond: How would the Trump apparatus talk about the pandemic, which it had grossly mismanaged, and how would it talk about race? The answer ended up being straightforward: with deceit. The difference was that with the pandemic, the convention simply sent Mike Pence to stand at a podium and lie about the administration’s COVID-19 response; to lie about the administration’s approach to America’s immigrant and minority population, however, the convention wanted to showcase real people. It got them without asking.

We now know that two of the weirder videos of the RNC featuring regular people were filmed without at least some of the participants knowing what the recording would be used for. In the first, a naturalization ceremony of conspicuously nonwhite new Americans was presided over by President Trump in the White House. In the second, four residents of New York public housing, all people of color, decried Mayor Bill de Blasio and offered praise of the Trump administration’s HUD investment in the city’s housing authority (NYCHA). That these people were deployed without their knowledge to boost the re-election chances of Donald Trump is not just unethical and hypocritical—it’s an act of rank dehumanization.

It’s easy for that fact to be obfuscated by the details. New citizen Sudha Sundari Narayanan told the New York Times she was “surprised and shocked and excited” to discover she was featured in the convention, and Salih Abdul Samad joked that he was now “a star.” NYCHA tenant and residential council president Claudia Perez told the Times “I am not a Trump supporter,” and said she was furious about not being informed of the video’s true purpose. But in the recording she also said, “President Trump’s administration has opened their ear and have listened.” If all these statements are true, that some of the naturalization participants aren’t unhappy at having been featured, and the NYCHA residents did have nice things to say about Trump’s HUD, then isn’t it a case of no harm, no foul?

It’s not. If the ostensible purpose of these videos is to show that, against much contrary evidence, the Trump administration cares about and works to improve the lives of nonwhite Americans, then why the ruse? Why not be honest with the very people whose welfare is supposedly being prioritized? It may be true that the people in the videos feel warmth or gratitude toward Trump, but that does not invalidate the violation of not having even been asked. Anyone lending their image or words to a four-night commercial for the president has the right to consent to that use. Maybe all five of the naturalized citizens would have agreed to the appearance, but we’ll never know. The calculus was already made not to bother—a deeper, more paternalistic exploitation than the speaking invitations made to white widows and parents who had lost loved ones to violence. Naturalized citizen Neimat Awadelseid told the Wall Street Journal that though she wasn’t told about the convention, she remembers signing a media release form—manipulation by fine print.

*snip*